Star Trek Voyager

Gene Roddenbury the founder of the proliferating Star Trek franchise was a comitted agnostic and humanist and, thus, might be a mite unhappy about the branching out into the domain of the religious and mystical but it happened in any case. You cannot determine the life of your own creations (as I know only too well). One of the first episodes of , to my mind, the best branch of the franchise, Voyager, has the second officer, Chakotay, a Native American, introducing his captain to her 'sacred guide animal'! Fine by me but for Gene?

However, the striking feature of Star Trek is how the values established at the outset continue to inform the whole. As the Pope remarked recently, the good is not the exclusive possession of the religious (indeed the Catholic) and Star Trek is a consistent exploration of what it might be to uphold and live the good as an ideal.

The original series established that the good embraced cultural and racial difference as a given (ground breaking in the 60's in an America emerging from sanctioned racial segregation and locked in conflict with the other) and this persists as a common thread throughout.

In Voyager the good life includes a radical sense of shared community - the disparate crew seeking together their home - that requires them to test the 'Federation's principles' against the stark reality of the unfamiliar. Any community lives (and dies) within the careful negotiation of belief and the stuff that happens. Too rigid an adherence kills, too loose an adherence dissipates.

Each episode is a parable of what it might mean to be fully 'human' (and one of the tensions in the whole series is the paradox by which ' humanity' is and is not the measure of all things). Thus in one episode the crew find themselves on a planet devoted to (apparent) hospitality only to discover that the purpose of this is to feed the host's sensuality. Can hospitality stand on the back of narcissism? To which the answer is, of course, no. However, in the process you find yourself considering what does it require of you to be the host? What does welcoming entail? What is the legitimate boundary between the pleasure in it and the duty?

What I find consistently remarkable is the ability of the series to weave lesson and drama and occupy a space of popular entertainment. The founder of the BBC, Lord Reith, famously saw it as the mission of the Corporation to educate as well as entertain, I suggest that Star Trek would be his perfect product if by education was meant an assimilation not of fact but of value.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog